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Mobile Computing Interfaces Are Broken--Check Out Some Cool Alternatives

You’ve got a supercomputer in your pocket, called a smartphone, that you can converse with. Maybe you’ll get one of the first GoogleGoogle Glass computer glasses when they’re publicly available next year. Cool, but is that all there is to mobile computing?

Not even close, according to a group of mobile computing leaders at MIT Technology Review’s first Mobile Summit in San Francisco today. “We need new kinds of interfaces,” said Jason Pontin, publisher and editor in chief of the magazine, which I also write for. At a conference session on how the mobile computing interface will evolve, a range of researchers and entrepreneurs said everything from our voices to our entire bodies will play a role in a new era of wearable computing.

Migicovsky’s Pebble has managed to actually make a smart watch that AppleApple and others are only rumored to be creating. Far from the iconic Dick Tracy device, Migicovsky explained, a smart watch is something that links to your smartphone and provides an interface for your phone.

The key is simplicity: black-and-white text that takes very little electricity, for one. Pebble also launched a software development kit that allowed developers to create different watch faces. One has created a link to a microwave oven so he can tell when his lunch is done.

Sports, health and fitness is one of the key applications Pebble has focused on. In this context, Pebble is a heads-up display (no glasses required).

Another key application: alerts and notifications. This has helped people extend their phone into their everyday life (as if they haven’t already). Some practical uses are weather alerts, stock and finance alerts, and a calendar for your appointments.

This is just the beginning of wearable interfaces, said Migicovsky. More than a watch, he said, Pebble is a platform for applications for wearable devices.

In an onstage interview with Om Malik, editor of the tech news site GigaOm, Migicovsky went into more detail. Why does anyone need a Pebble watch? Malik asked. Isn’t wearable computing an oxymoron, given that the choice of stuff you wear is largely for fashion? With Pebble, you have the opportunity to make it what you want. That’s why there are some 13,000 different watch faces.

But your body is pretty premium real estate, Malik insisted. These watches still don’t look very appealing. “There’s a lot more work we can do to increase the usability of the product,” Migicovsky admitted.

Will the smart watch replace the smartphone? Malik wondered. Not really, Migicovsky said, if only because smartphones have room for a battery to handle the wide variety of things people do with them.

Notifications are by nature disruptive and distracting, Malik noted. If we have a device like Pebble that produces even more of those, how do we avoid distraction? Technology does change the daily activities of humans, but it can also amplifies them, Migicovsky said–and so it is with smartphones, which many people check obsessively. Pebble hopefully will not change their basic behavior, but it may also amplify it.

The wrist is still a small piece of real estate, so if you try to cram too much on watches, it loses its basic appeal, Migicovsky said.

What will become the main device or interface for wearable computing? “I’m slightly biased toward the wrist right now,” he said. But he added that that wearable computing will be distributed in various places around the body. They will probably piggyback on the data connection of the smartphone.

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